Tom, I'm afraid there's a lot of competition out there for the title of "Biggest Moron on Talk Radio."
Here's Rush Limbaugh celebrating Dishonest Abe's birthday today (I'm posting large portions of it because it will disappear from the free side of Limbaugh's website tomorrow afternoon):
RUSH: We've been playing a little game here, Stump the Staff, during the break at the top of the hour. I asked them a little history question. I know my history, and I think not enough people do, particularly in the news media. I know my history, and I asked them one simple question. "Who said, 'The Constitution is not a suicide pact'?" And they guessed. What did you say? Truman, FDR, Kennedy. Those are the three guesses. Nope. "Who said, 'The Constitution is not a suicide pact'?" It was Abraham Lincoln. . . . Let me give you just a little Civil War history. During the Civil War, there was a group called the Copperheads. Now, the Copperheads have a modern equivalent today, the peace movement of the Democratic Party, or basically the Democratic Party. They were called the Copperheads back then.
A former Ohio congressman, a man by the name of Clement Vallandigham called the prosecution of the Civil War wicked and cruel and he suggested that Lincoln and the Republican Party were using the Civil War to establish a dictatorship. Troops of the 115th Ohio Volunteer Infantry seized Clement Vallandigham from his home in Dayton. A military commission tried him for treasonable utterances and turned him over to the Confederate Army. Jefferson Davis didn't want Vallandigham any more than Lincoln did and eventually shipped him off to Canada from where he managed to slip back into the United States. Abraham Lincoln lamented, "Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?" Why, this conjures up all kinds of fun things! Grabbing Dingy Harry [Reid], putting him on trial, and expelling him to the remote regions of Pakistan where Al-Qaeda is holing up. That's interesting to contemplate. Abraham Lincoln did it. I don't know how he ever got a monument. The Democrats must have been looking the other way. "The Constitution is not a suicide pact," Abraham Lincoln. This is exactly how the Democrats would like it to read today. It is a suicide pact. We must extend constitutional rights to enemy combatants, according to the left, according to Senator McCain. . . .
FDR? Did he protect civil liberties when he rounded up 110,000 Japanese and moved them from their homes and businesses to internment camps? And Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Lincoln actually deported somebody he thought was just an agitator. Somebody he thought was just an agitator? How about RFK, Robert F. Kennedy, authorizing the wiretapping of Martin Luther King, Jr.? Last I looked, Lincoln and FDR are among our greatest presidents ever, among our greatest civil libertarians ever. You want to test this? Go tell some Democrat friend of yours that FDR was no friend of civil liberties. See what you get. They think he's the greatest guy we've ever had, and RFK -- the greatest president we almost had -- is also considered to be a fabulous guy and he's out there wiretapping Martin Luther King. Are these the kind of civil liberties these people are talking about? I need to have this answered because I can round up all kinds of Democrats that violate civil liberties left and right in the prosecution of war, because the Constitution is not a death sentence.
Abraham Lincoln: it's not a suicide pact.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You want to hear some more history? Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus when he had reporters thrown into prison because they wrote against him in the union. He threw nine members of the Maryland legislature into prison to prevent that state from possibly pulling out of the union. This is all history and when you understand history, it will put him in even greater context just how legally and in a restrained fashion Bush is fighting this war. Lincoln is one of our greatest presidents ever. Here he deports an agitator to the South. The South says, "We don't want the guy." They recognize a traitor when they see one. They send him to Canada. Can you imagine sending Dingy Harry over to Pakistan or Afghanistan? Ha-ha! Can you imagine putting New York Times reporters in jail? Except the president didn't do that. Sorry, the prosecutor they asked for did. Can you imagine the president doing this? Folks, folks, I can't tell you what I would do if the president decided to put the press in jail. (Gasping)
We are in the midst of a war, and when you understand that everything changes -- and if you don't have a historical context for these kinds of things, if you think history began the day you were born, and so nothing that has happened outside your lifetime is relevant, you're not going to understand the important things about the country's past and preserving our country's future. This business of going to war to protect civil liberties that Tim Russert has been on the past couple days! The Supreme Court has made clear that at a time of war the president has inherent powers to protect national security. That's why there's one commander-in-chief and not 535 of them. . . .
They can't really complain about Lincoln because he ended slavery. How can they start criticizing Lincoln, the libs? You know what else he did? He put nine members of the Maryland legislature in jail too, and he suspended the writ of habeas corpus and he deported some former congressman from Ohio who was an agitator -- and you think what's going on now poses a threat to the country? You're the threat! But you send an average reporter down and give them just this little bit of history and I guarantee you it will be all over the world that Limbaugh lies; makes things up just to fit his context. They won't even bother looking it up. They'll find it so absurd.
"Not possible in this country," they'll say.
END TRANSCRIPT
Rush also has on his home page a link to a conversation he had with, as he puts it, a "Confederate Kook" back in December which ends thus:
RUSH: You know what? I hope before you die you learn to thank God for Abraham Lincoln.
CALLER: I hope before you die you learn what a racist and a bigot and a power-hungry maniac he was.
RUSH: I'm the racist and the bigot?
CALLER: I didn't say you were. I said he was!
RUSH: Oh. Abraham Lincoln? How in the world you can call a guy who ended slavery a racist and a bigot? I have heard everything now. Everything, in 22 years of hosting this program, I have heard everything.
END TRANSCRIPT
Finally, to prove what an extreme leftist Barack Obama is (and I'm sure he is, but not because of these comments), there's also a link to a NewsMax article which quotes Obama as follows: "I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. As a law professor and civil rights lawyer and as an African-American, I am fully aware of his limited views on race. Anyone who actually reads the Emancipation Proclamation knows it was more a military document than a clarion call for justice."
